When I first heard Laura Veirs’ July Flame early this year, I could only make sense of its magnificence by dubbing her “the female Mark Kozelek.” At the Cedar on Saturday night, Veirs told of a trip to the same venue in the mid 90s—when she was a 21-year old nerve-wracked coffee shop performer and student at Carleton College—to see Kozelek and his band Red House Painters, then at their creative peak. She didn’t indicate if that concert was a formative experience, but this tentative link is one way to understand the lush beauty of her songs, which reject the category of folk music (too much history, too much alchemy in her musical evolution for that), while still deriving their power from their closeness to the ground. July Flame is her seventh album, but it might be the one she’s remembered for: it speaks of joys and sorrows that must be deepened by time before they can be properly rendered.
Veirs is now a long way from her coffee shop origins (though let’s not pretend “coffee shop” is a bad word; the hushed and hypnotic qualities of that milieu remain). Songs that are fully orchestrated on record are barely less so with her touring band The Hall of Flames (guitarist Tim Young and violinist Alex Guy, who opened the concert as nom de stage Led To Sea), who, with their effects pedals (distorted violin on “John Henry Lives”!) and piercing harmonies and virtuosic solos and fingerpicked drumbeats, could hardly be said to be playing “acoustic.” All three stood side-by-side, squarely facing the audience, making for the most “here we are” stage setup I’ve seen in ages. The redheaded and lovely-voiced Veirs (astute readers will remember her as the lover awaiting her man’s return on The Decemberists’ “Yankee Bayonet”) is yet not the possessor of pipes so soulful as to be the thing that helps her to overcome her minute stature (a singer as short as she is must find a way to make herself loom large). She does this simply through the strength of her songwriting, which, over the course of seven albums, she has brought to the level of earthiness that suits her best.
And yet, she contains multitudes. She played the traditional song “The Cuckoo,” but foremost in my mind was Kristin Hersh’s version of the same on her 1994 album Hips and Makers. Could Veirs lead her own Throwing Muses? Tiny fragments of melody in new songs like “Where Are You Driving?” and “Life Is Good Blues” seem to come straight from the James Mercer songbook. Could she lead her own Shins? Probably (the evidence, from her formative years in an all-girl punk band to her current Portland hometown, is staggering), but either way she’s making the best music of her life, or any life she might have lived. She’s as charming and enviable as the cool girl in her song “Carol Kaye” (which began her set), but with talents that extend far beyond covers.
Opening act The Watson Twins were more modest in their arrangements, though no less intriguing as performers. An acoustic guitar passed back and forth between sisters Chandra and Leigh over the course of their set, one strumming and singing and the other providing harmonies. Like their former collaborator Jenny Lewis, the Watsons seem to have emerged fresh from some house party of mingling rock ‘n’ rollers and new folkies in early 70s L.A. While Lewis made like the leader of a Fleetwood Mac revival on 2008’s Acid Tongue, the Watsons make the sort of gentle and unassuming folk music that can’t compete in terms of sheer artistry, but which time should be equally kind to. Their originals fall into this category, but they really come alive when playing covers: a melancholy barroom version of The Cure’s “Just Like Heaven,” and most impressively, a spare rendition of Bill Withers’ “Ain’t No Sunshine,” which, via an intricate arrangement of handclaps, intensifying vocals and carefully chosen silences, didn’t lose any of the original’s blues.
The Watsons referred to their tour with Veirs as the “Eight Is Enough Tour”: five women, two men, and one baby. The baby is Veirs’ newborn Tennessee (and the woman yet unnamed in this review is his backstage nanny, I assume). Whether or not Tennessee grows up to be a gay playwright, his April birth date (one month after Veirs’ last appearance at the Cedar) helps to illuminate the imagery of “July Flame,” the great song that ended her set. A conception song, after all? Its “can I call you mine?” refrain suggests maybe so, and its pulsing, mesmerizing tug (perfectly executed without the aid of a drum set) places the listener inside some kind of womb, whether literal or dreamt.
Setlist:
Carol Kaye
Ether Sings
Sun Is King
John Henry Lives
When You Give Your Heart
Where Are You Driving?
The Cuckoo
Spelunking
Song My Friends Taught Me
Life Is Good Blues
Wide-Eyed, Legless
Make Something Good
I Can See Your Tracks
July Flame
Freight Train (Encore)
Through December (Encore)
The Watson Twins:
